EVE Online about Adjusting your colony to the changes made in Incursion 1.1

Placing your Extractor Control Unit

When the old extractors are gone you need to build an Extractor Control Unit (ECU). You will be able to extract one resource per ECU using multiple (maximum 10) Extractor Heads in the vicinity of the parent ECU so you will want to make sure you place your ECU in such a fashion that its range covers the relevant resource hotspot. You see the ECU’s range when you have bought it from the build menu and are deciding where to place it.

When you have placed the ECU so that the relevant resource is in range you move on to configuring the ECU. Click on the ECU and then on the “Survey” button, or simply double click on the ECU.

The survey window is drastically different than the previous extractors. The first line of action should be to set the resource for the ECU. You do this by clicking the corresponding resource in the top right of the survey window. The resource view will load as soon as you select a resource in the ECU, this will allow you to move on to the next step of configuring your ECU – placing the extractor heads.

When the resource is set you should add as many extractor heads as you intend to use, remember that they cost Power and CPU. You add extractor heads by clicking the empty slots in the left pane of the survey window. It does not matter which sot you choose. The extractor heads appear close by your ECU and you may move them on to the resource hot spot as long as the ECU is idling.

Adjusting program length and avoiding overlap

The ECU has an automation feature called “Program length”. This will allow you to tell the ECU how long you want the extraction to run for. As a consequence of increasing the length of the extraction program your extractor heads will expand their uptake area. The uptake area represents the area the extractor head is affecting. Having uptake areas overlap will cause the extractor heads to extract from the same area and thereby lessen their individual yield. This effect is visualized both on the extractor heads themselves as a noise on the uptake area, and as a red % number in your list of extractor heads.

The ECU graph

The most visible difference in the Incursion 1.1 version of Planetary Interaction is the ECU graph. It replaces the deposits that were previously visible on the Survey window.

The Graph provides information on the resource yield per cycle over the entire length of the extraction program. It’s worth noting that the cycle’s length increases in longer programs. To get more information you can hover your mouse over every individual cycle in the graph.

A summary of the total extraction program is available in the bottom right corner of the window. Make sure to keep an eye on this as you move your extractor heads to their optimal position.

Submitting a program

Once you have selected a resource to extract, the desired amount of extractor heads, the correct program length you may submit the program to the ECU. The ECU won’t extract anything until you submit the program (and remember to submit your changes above the build menu).

When a program is running you will be unable to make any changes to the ECU, in order to make changes you need to stop the program. Don’t hesitate to stop a program in order to submit a new one, this is a perfectly viable strategy to optimize your extraction output. Be careful not to stop too often as this will set the ECU in cooldown mode which will prevent you from stopping the program for a period of time.

As a program is running, you can see a line indicating where in the program the ECU is currently. An ample time to stop and re-submit a program is when the progress line has moved past the main spikes in the graph, the main yield is often located in the first days of a program.

Routing from the ECU

Routing and the way you interact with it is not significantly changed. It’s worth noting that the links from the extractor heads to the ECU are free of power and CPU cost and automatically route so you only need to handle routing from the ECU itself. The links from the extractor heads cannot be overloaded or make any sort of trouble.

A word on depletion and nuggets

As a part of the Incursion 1.1 Planetary Interaction we have kicked depletion into gear as well as added something we call “nuggets”.

Depletion works pretty much as you would expect but here are some important facts.

A short extractor program that is constantly re-submitted on the same hot spot depletes more aggressively than a long program with the same amount of extractor heads
Depleted resources re-generate over time
You can achieve equilibrium by pulling out the same amount of resources that the planet re-generates. It’s a balance act.
Nuggets are temporary hotspots that sometimes appear on planets. You will not necessary be able to identify them but if you compared the resource map on a planet over days you would see that the hot spots sometimes appear and move around a little. To capitalize on the nuggets, make sure you look for hotspots before submitting a program, since they might have moved.